In celebration of the
Suffrage Centennial in the United States, from June 2019 (one hundred years
after Congress passed the 19th Amendment) to August 2020 (one
hundred years after it was ratified), I am giving various “Dressed to Protest: What Women Wore to the
Revolution” presentations. In addition to showing how women used costume as “political armor” to finally get the vote, I share stories about a number of the courageous women involved in the seven-decades-long campaign.
I ended my first presentation recently with this short story below about Carrie Chapman Catt, with a powerful quote from her still relevant today. She was a protege of Susan B. Anthony and president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1900 to 1904 and then again in the dramatic final years of the campaign from 1915 to 1920.
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Once Carrie Catt
returned home to Juniper Ledge in New York after the hot, exhausting Tennessee
fight—and after the glorious NYC parade honoring women’s newly-won suffrage
where she stood in the back of a car in her royal blue “ratification dress” to salute the cheering crowd, tall and
proud, her hat tilted to one side, the other arm holding the gigantic bouquet
of blue delphiniums (her favorite flower) and suffrage-yellow chrysanthemums,
where “she seemed at once the victorious general and the beloved queen,” as
Elaine Weiss described in The Woman’s Hour—Carrie
sat at her desk and, looking out at her garden, wrote “a poignant charge to
the women voters of the nation”:
The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guaranty of your liberty. That vote of yours has cost millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of women. Women have suffered agony of soul which you never can comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it!
The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense,
a prayer. Use it intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully. Progress is
calling to you to make no pause. Act! ~